Archive for the ‘Daddy’s Home’ Category

As much as I like exotic foods, preparing them can be hard. Take mangos, for example. They’re not particularly unusual, but they’re also not part of my regular diet. So when I bought two of the beautifully shaded fruits at the grocery store last week, I turned to the Internet for advice. One website recommended slicing the mangos like avocados, then cubing the fruit and removing the skin using a few simple strokes. This website, I’m sorry to say, was wrong. I ended up mushing the innards as I tried to pull the fruit apart, resulting in a huge mess. Pretty soon, I was salvaging whatever bits I could before chucking the soggy remainder in the garbage.

It’s the middle of May, right? It’s not unreasonable to expect nice weather, right? Well, apparently it is unreasonable to expect nice weather in Chicago. After enjoying a week of sunshine and temperatures in the low ’80s, I left the house Friday morning wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Then, some time between the hours of 8:30 and 5:00, the weather took a turn for the worse. The sun hid behind a wall of gray, the temperature dropped 25 degrees, and huge rainclouds gathered ominously on the horizon. Sure, I rode my bike home from the train station Friday afternoon, but I spent the rest of the cold, dreary weekend indoors, a decision I don’t regret.

Peeps may be many things, but delicious is not one of them. If they were delicious, people would eat them year-round. As it is, we choke down a handful of these gritty, rabbit-shaped marshmallows on Easter, then manage to forget how bad they were over the ensuing summer, fall, and winter. If someone handed me a slice of pumpkin pie in April, I would be excited. If someone handed me a Peep in November, I would wonder what I had done to offend them. Then I would trot over to the microwave to perform a ritual sacrifice of the artificially-flavored monstrosity, wishing it good riddance as it spun its way toward gooey demise.

Who doesn’t like the goofy? The very stern, I suppose, but let them have their soulless austerity, if that’s what they want. The rest of us can sidestep things that are crushing and serious by focusing on things that are silly. We can sprint, hop, tumble, laugh, and make weird expressions. The pinky fingers tugging at the sides of the mouth? Been there. The upper lip stretched out to meet the lower row of teeth? Done that. The thumbs glued to the temples in an imitation of Bullwinkle the Moose? Goes without saying. So here’s to the folks who never got tired of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the grown-ass men who still get a kick out of Loony Toons, and the elderly couples who engage in tickle fights. Cheers.

For years, my wife used to make a simple request of me whenever we were in the car. “When we get home,” she’d say, “remind me to [call / text / e-mail] so-and-so.” Variations on this request included, “Remind me to pick up [a particular foodstuff] at the grocery store” and, “Remind me to bring [this important piece of paperwork] to the office tomorrow. It’s really, really important!” Now I’m an organized guy, but that doesn’t mean I have the ability to organize someone else’s schedule in my head. In fact, nine times out of ten, I’d forget to jostle my wife’s memory. Needless to say, her requests have tapered off. That’s a win-win, if you ask me.

I’m going to assume that this strip’s reference to Nosferatu as a “Hollywood” vampire movie is an honest mistake. Nosferatu was indeed released in 1922, but it was made in Germany by the wonderful director, F.W. Murnau. (He would come to Hollywood four years later, only to die tragically in a car accident in 1931.) Still, it’s worth noting that foreign language films were not necessarily off-putting to American audiences during the silent era. That’s probably because there was no dialogue to subtitle or (gag) dub using American actors. Title cards could be easily translated, which meant foreign films were as accessible as domestic films. In that sense, Nosferatu had the opportunity to grab a much bigger audience in America than, say, the 2008 vampire flick from Sweden, Let the Right One In.

Let’s give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume, for a moment, that he doesn’t own “good underwear” and “bad underwear,” but that he owns “good underwear” and “average, run-of-the-mill underwear.” Maybe he has an important meeting and wants to wear his special pair of skivvies – the ones that give him confidence. Sound far-fetched? Then explain the shelf full of superhero boxers that I saw at a department store this past weekend…large superhero boxers…adult-size superhero boxers. I found them to be incredibly silly, but apparently there is a market for this stuff.